Civics Lesson

Steven Spielberg's Amistad aims high, but oversimplifies

Steven Spielberg's Amistad is being given the big picture treatment -- Schindler's List big, not Jurassic Park big. Last week's Newsweek featured the film on its cover, calling it "Spielberg's controversial new movie," even though it had not yet been released and the only "controversy" was a legal one about alleged cribbing by screenwriter David Franzoni from the novel Echo of Lions, which has a theme similar to the movie's.

In fact, Spielberg's film -- about the 1839 revolt of 53 Africans aboard the Spanish slave ship La Amistad and their subsequent capture and trials in America -- is designed to be uncontroversial. It's not a work of great imagination or depth or historical feeling; except in its opening scene, and a harrowing depiction of the Middle Passage, it doesn't try to offer up a view of race or slavery that might powerfully challenge audiences, particularly white audiences, to examine their consciences.

What it does instead is straightforwardly re-create an incendiary and relatively unremarked episode in American history, in which the captured Africans' cause is taken up by abolitionists and finally argued successfully by ex-President John Quincy Adams (Anthony Hopkins) before the Supreme Court. Amistad is not, by Hollywood standards, as hokey as most historical dramas, but it's still squarely in the Hollywood-historical camp. Lavishly produced, it has a rehearsed dignity, as if it were intended as a super-duper high school history curriculum teaching aid.

The one bit of real daring in the film is its opening: Joseph Cinque (West African actor Djimon Hounsou), the name given by the Spanish to an abducted Mende rice farmer enslaved aboard La Amistad, works loose his shackles and leads a revolt against the white Spaniards. It's clear what's going on even if we haven't yet been primed as to why; horrifying as the scene is, it exists in a righteous, comprehensible framework. And yet Cinque, photographed against a thunder-and-lightning night sky, his teeth bared, is a monster unleashed -- and that's the point. Cinque here is a white man's nightmare of the avenging savage, and Spielberg doesn't deny the bloodlust of the moment, or the revulsion and estrangement audiences of any color may feel in watching it.

This sense of dislocation is what's missing from most racial dramas, especially historical ones. So much is made of how we are all brothers under the skin that we never get to experience the strangeness and alienation that's also part of the picture. Herman Melville's great short novel Benito Cereno, which is also about a slave ship revolt, is the great American text of the horror of racial separateness, and it would probably be too incendiary to film even today (though John Huston and others, including Phillip Noyce, wanted to). Early on in Amistad, Spielberg ventures into Benito Cerenostyle choppy waters, only to paddle into the shallows of the civics lesson. Shackles are transformed into laurel wreaths.

The drama is set in motion when the mutinous Africans, who've set off from Cuba numbering 39 survivors, are captured off the coast of Long Island and transferred to a prison in New London, Connecticut, a state where, unlike New York, slavery is still legal. Battle lines are drawn immediately. The abolitionists, headed up by the evangelical Lewis Tappan (Stellan Skarsgard) and scrappy property lawyer Roger Baldwin (Matthew McConaughey) and ex-slave Theodore Joadson (Morgan Freeman) face off in the lower courts against the government prosecutor William S. Holabird (Pete Postlethwaite) and the secretary of state during Martin Van Buren's administration, John Forsyth (David Paymer).

Cranky and infirm, Adams resists the implorings of the abolitionists until Van Buren (Nigel Hawthorne), up for re-election and fearing the loss of the southern states, overturns the lower courts and appoints a new and supposedly more sympathetic judge -- to no ultimate avail. Adams's argument for the Africans' freedom, which actually consisted of some four-and-a-half hours of dense legalisms, is reduced to a grandstanding monologue before the Supreme Court in which he invokes the spirit of the founding fathers (including his own father, John Adams) and receives for his troubles the hearty handclasp of a grateful Cinque. It's black chief/white chief time.

Spielberg and Franzoni (with a hefty uncredited assist from Schindler's List screenwriter Steven Zaillian) work their way through the maze of pressure tactics both sides employed. It's to their credit that the various legal maneuvers -- the early attempt by the abolitionists, for example, to characterize the Africans not as slaves but as "stolen goods" -- come across without a lot of dumbing down. And yet what is missing from the film is the almost hallucinatory jumble of legal complications and wranglings that the Africans' trials engendered, and the way those complications heatedly divided the country. The problem with Amistad is that, in attempting to render its events lucidly, it loses the drama in what was inherently a legal, ethical and political crazy quilt.

The point of Spielberg's populist approach, of course, is that it was all quite simple: The Amistad case was about justice. Obviously. But so, in a sense, was the Civil War; yet if one were to unclutter the issues of that war, the richness of its drama would be lost. The Amistad case was a prelude to that war -- its crazy quilt is cut from the same zigzag weave.